Many children and retarded persons find great difficulty in tying their shoelaces into bows. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,721,468 and 4,842,522 describe a training shoelace with moderately stiff end portions having spaced Velcro retainers (hook and loop type retainers). When the Velcro retainers are pressed together, the shoelace end portion retains a loop shape, which greatly aids in tying a bow.
The above-described patents describe a moderately stiff shoelace formed by an ordinary woven shoelace core and a copper wire threaded through the core to stiffen it. While this construction results in sufficient stiffness, the wire can "kink" if a loop portion is pulled tight, and thereafter tends to retain a sharp curve at the formerly kinked location. The wire also tends to also have a memory of the shape to which it was previously bent, which hampers tying of a bow.
The Velcro retainers can be mounted by sewing Velcro pads to a shoelace core. The Velcro pads add to the thickness of shoelace portions, and the miniature hooks and loops of the Velcro create drag, that both can hamper tying of a shoelace.
It is sometimes desirable to quickly mount a training shoelace on a shoe just for teaching purposes, and to be able to quickly remove it. However, the need to thread the lace through all of the eyelets of the shoe makes the process tedious. In addition, it often happens that after threading the shoelace through all the eyelets, that one end is significantly longer than the other, and time must be taken to adjust the shoelace so the ends are equal to facilitate tying. A teaching shoelace with moderate stiffness but without memory or the other advantages of a copper wire within a fabric shoelace, which provided a low cost retainer for holding a bow shape which minimized drag, and which could be rapidly installed and removed from a shoe with the projecting shoelace end portions easily kept to be of equal lengths, would be of considerable value in the teaching of the tying of a bow.